Hi, my name is Austin Ardor and I’ve been a professional worldbuilder and ghostwriter for over half a decade. After spending most of my life either reading books or writing them, I want to help new writers learn the ropes so that they can do their stories justice.

Hello and welcome, I hope you have all been doing good lately. Today we’ll be covering one of my favourite pieces of advice that I regularly give to people who are trying to balance other life stuff with their writing work. If you’ve noticed that accountants and wall-street brokers tend to have a lack of scifi space operas, you’re not alone. I used to struggle with sitting down to properly write back when I was working in marketing for a few different businesses. I used to do my 12 hours of work and then late at night attempt to write, but since my battery was about burnt out by the end of the day, I had maybe 2 hours of wanting to write and maybe 10 minutes of actually writing a day.

After I quit my business antics to actually try to become a writer, I noticed a huge jump in my creative thinking. At first, I thought it was because I just had more time and focus to dedicate to my projects, but it turned out to be a lot more than that.

Studies have shown that creative thinking activates the right hemisphere of the brain region, while non-creative thinking activates the left hemisphere. Creative thinking is associated with increased activity in areas of the brain networks responsible for divergent thinking, such as the frontal lobe and temporal lobe.

We often hear that people have either logical brains or creative brains. While there are dominant tendencies, everyone is capable of accessing the full extent of either side of their brain. However, when you’re doing one kind of work for a long period of time, unused pathways fall dormant to push all the energy into those neural pathways that are firing off in quick succession. If you’re trying to brainstorm a way that your main character survives the belly of a sea monster, your brain is very far away from doing physics homework. This can contribute to some serious roadblocks in the creative process, particularly if our day jobs aren’t creative: retail, coffee baristas, lawyers, car mechanics, etc.

The goods news is that there are ways around this. Your brain has trouble multitasking between logical and creative tasks, but dedicated focus to either logic or creative thinking lets you sink into a flow state faster. This is something called ‘Time blocking.’

Time Blocking

Time blocking is a time management method where you divide your day into blocks of time. Each block is dedicated to a ccomplishing a specific task, or a specific group of tasks, in order to increase your productivity.

I touched on this concept in my article ‘Theory of the Triangle’ where I explained the benefits of having dedicated time for self-investment, self-expression, and self-enjoyment. By having an unchallenged, dedicated chunk of your day set aside, you can practically expect a huge jump in productivity.

However, Time Blocking is at it’s most effective when you select the tasks according to how closely related they are: If you have two hours to write 1000 words for your scifi novel, it’s better paired with ambient music rather than a history podcast.

We’re combining two concepts here:

The first is from Cal Newport’s book Deep Work. If you have anything meaningful that you’re working towards in life, whether it’s writing music or training for the Olympics, you need to read this book within the next three months. It’s one of my favourite nonfiction books of all time, and I constantly reference it in my work. In it, Cal uncovers the secret of superstar performance and the key to becoming a master in any field, aptly named ‘Deep Work’. Deep Work is this concept of distractionless, almost-monastic long hours of work dedicated to a particular skill or project. As it turns out, humans actually can’t multitask. Our brain can handle one focal point at a time. Having Netflix on in the background is catastrophic for our work flow. If you have the ability to do it, throw your phone in the other room and block youtube on your browser, throw a sign up on your door, and lock yourself into a trance. If nothing is there to pull your attention, you can achieve much more in less time - Deep Work.

The second concept of time blocking is the grouping of tasks as to whether they are more creative-brained or logical-brained. Quote from Deep Work:

• “When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.”

• According to Sophie Leroy, “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.”

The idea is that that lingering attention lodged that’s attempting to use your logic-brained circuits to complete the thought train is like trudging through cement when you want to transition to a creative-brained task. If you have consecutive deep work periods of fiction work and then doing taxes, for example, the layover period in between will be massive. It’s also a big enough gap for your brain to convince you that you deserve a break to binge watch something.

For a writer, switching between your logical and creative brains can feel like brain fog or writer’s block. Researching what you’re writing while you’re writing it can be draining and, at the end of a long rabbit’s hole, feel like you wasted your time reading about a topic instead of writing. I had the exact same problem when I was early in my worldbuilding days researching how humans made constellations and the stories behind them, or exactly how islands were formed for fantasy map illustrators to understand the world vision better. I first learned about this concept of task-specific time blocking from a podcast between Tom Bilyeu and Jay Shetty when they talked about having dedicated hours per week for business administration and dedicated hours for content creation and brainstorming. I decided to apply the concepts to my own work through the idea of ‘Nonfiction and Fiction’ work.

Nonfiction work is anything real-world such as research, querying, your day job, etc. Things that you have to have to sit and focus on that require numbers, problem solving, or specific kinds of memory recall count as nonfiction work.

Fiction work is anything imaginary and storytelling. Creating magic system rules, protagonist goals, writing dialogue between two characters, writing descriptions, and everything else falls under this category.

Setting aside distraction-free time to dedicate to a specific task heavily contributes to focus and productivity. If you remove the need for your brain to switch from logical and creative sides of your brain, it paves the way to flow state.

There are also two things that complete this cycle: Maintenance states and state changes.

Maintenance states are states that simply continue whatever mind state you’re in. These are the gaps where there’s space for daydreaming and thinking: the shower, cooking, grocery shopping, sleeping, etc. Your brain is always working on a task, even on the subconscious level, even when you’re away from your desk. These spaces can be really useful for making a breakthrough or putting in a different kind of deep work into your story. I’ve met a lot of authors who swear that their best story ideas and character discoveries happen in the shower. Making space for these Maintenance states are incredibly important, but you also can’t force them to happen. Just like a piece of our attention lingers on the previous task, so too will this.

State changes, taken from state breaks in the field of psychology, are the transition zones from logical brain thinking into creative brain thinking and vice versa. In my experience, these can happen accidentally, but most often you’ll need to intentionally use some sort of ritual to change.

When I’m changing from a nonfiction state into a fiction state, I’ll try and get my mind enraptured, not overwhelmed, with imaginary worlds. Watch a new movie related to the genre you want to be writing in, read a book or two, so on and so forth. Avoid podcasts about business and real life. Sink into D&D and music. Go through digital art on Pinterest and listen to a writing playlist. You get the gist. As soon as your mind gets into an extended flow state and asking ‘what if’ questions, you’re on the right track. The goal here is to get my brain to complete the sentence and fall into the next one, hitting the ground running.

The longer you can remain in a certain state using maintenance, the more work your subconscious will do for you. This is why writers have a legendary habit of booking a cabin alone in the woods for a month to do absolutely nothing but write. It works. Depending on how dedicated you are to your writing, you could even get a repetitive task day job that makes a lot of space for daydreaming and thinking.

You might feel some avoidance or procrastination around a new task. This is a result of your brain not switching into the new state well enough. You can use discipline to muscle through it and force the change, or you can take some time to make the switch with a ritual. Do this by rereading your document, writing a smaller scene idea, or looking through the inspiration pinterest folder.

How to pull off the fiction/nonfiction cycle.

If you want to give the fiction/nonfiction cycle a try, it might help to make a list or keep notes of specific tasks for when you're in a certain state. Instead of doing some unnecessary brain-grinding, you can wait until the creative weekend to tackle it. I have a Notion task list page where I quickly jot down an idea or something I need to do, and then I reread it whenever I’m in the proper headspace to explore the idea fully.

If you have a day job to get to, consider blocking specific times of your day out. You can use mornings to be logical or creative, then in the afternoon, do the opposite. Or perhaps you want to devote a whole day to being creative and take the next day for logical tasks. Whatever works best for your schedule, just make sure you block off the starting and ending times for each thing you work on.

Take time on Sunday before the work week starts to map out what the week ahead will look like. That way, you don’t procrastinate or over think what you have to do and you have a clear and concise plan for the week. No time is wasted wondering what’s next.

You don't want to schedule creative time during your most productive time; you want to schedule it when you're slightly less goal-oriented and sharp, when you’re on the downward slope and you’ve started to fatigue, so that you're open to different ways of thinking and creating

I’ve found that it works best for me to do a “one week on, one week off” type of schedule, alternating between fiction and nonfiction with a transition state changer on weekends to prep me for the week ahead. This gives me a lot of depth to my work even in the off-hours so that I can utilize things like dreaming and maintenance states to their full potential.

You can also do it hourly as well: our brains work on a 90 minute timer, so slotting things into that 90 minute column helps your brain change it’s direction. Use changes in environment and environment associations to help you: when you come home from your engineering job, throw on some themed music on the ride home. Make dinner to decompress and put on a netflix show that relates to the genre of your work to change your brain’s direction from the stress of the day. Then, head over to your desk where you’ve been working on your next bestseller, and you’ll be able to sink into it easier. Listening to the news and then popping open a tab as soon as you get in the door won’t be as effective compared to this.

Tips and Tricks

Pairing the nonfiction/fiction work period method with the theory of the triangle is a recipe to become superproductive. You can hack your own psychology to avoid burnout, write stellar stories, and put in the work you need to do to achieve your dreams

Try to figure out what time of day you’re the most productive and when you feel the most creative. This might be one of the most important pieces of advice I can give to a writer who is trying to make the most of their time. If you’re planning out a plotline, it helps to have all hands on deck. Stack the cards in your favour.

Outro

If you enjoyed this podcast as much as I did, rate 5 stars and send it to a friend. You can follow me for more tips, tricks, and book reviews at AustinArdor on all socials. I do offer ghostwriting and writing coaching services on my website of the same name as well if you or someone you know wants the extra creative boost to bring you to the next level. You can also support other small authors at The Myth Dimension, a hybrid publishing company designed to support authors with a much larger royalty payment and marketing training to help you build the business side of writing a book. Thank you for everything, and I’ll see you in the next one.